Ron Mann (2014)

This documentary about the life and work of Robert Altman is well organised and, on the surface, comprehensive:  reference is made to every one of Altman’s thirty-five dramatic features for cinema and his years in television drama are well summarised.  (He directed – among many other things – episodes of Whirlybirds in 1958 and 1959.  It was during the making of one of these that he met his third wife, Kathryn Reed.)  I found out from Altman plenty of things that I didn’t know beforehand (or had forgotten).  Jack Warner fired Altman from his debut cinema feature, the space drama Countdown (1968), because Warner thought a director who had the actors speaking over each other must be incompetent.  Altman really did, in the early 1970s, revolutionise film sound recording:  the company USL developed for him a portable eight-channel location recording system, which allowed the voices of various actors to be recorded and mixed (and offered an alternative to the traditional use of a boom, with a microphone held as close as possible to the main actors).    It’s interesting to hear a film-maker as technically innovative as Altman stressing what he sees as the primacy of the actors in a movie – he very evidently loved actors and working with them.  It’s interesting too that, late in life and after years of feeling pleased with himself for being non-repetitive, he came to see his work differently:  ‘It’s all just one film to me – just different chapters.’  I don’t think I knew that Altman had had a heart transplant in 1995:  as is made clear in this film, he kept that as quiet as he could, for fear of becoming, as far as studios were concerned, unemployable.

Ron Mann has chosen – one assumes with the help of Kathryn Reed Altman, who served as a consultant on the film – extracts from several interviews conducted with her late husband over the decades.  These clips often left me wanting more, and not in the way that the accompanying excerpts from Altman’s movies did.   (The latter excerpts are well enough chosen although Mann includes the celebrated opening sequence shot of The Player in a rather strange way:  a legend on the screen announces that the shot lasted eight minutes but Mann fast-forwards through most of it, reverting to normal speed only for what he feels he has time to show.)  Altman says at one point that he thinks Tanner ’88, his political ‘mockumentary’ television series for HBO in 1988, is his most imaginative work but we never hear what he regarded as his more or less successful cinema films.  As well as very brief summary descriptions of critical reactions to a few of these, there’s a montage of one-line raves for M*A*S*H, Pauline Kael’s voice reading two or three sentences from her paean to McCabe and Mrs Miller, and a longer clip of the TV critic Gene Shalit panning Popeye – but you don’t learn how much reviews or commercial success mattered to Altman.  You understand they weren’t greatly important to him – but didn’t they matter to the extent that they potentially affected the prospects for his doing what he wanted to do next?   Kathryn Reed Altman mentions that he had wanted to bring Raymond Carver’s short stories to the screen for several years before Short Cuts was made (in 1993) but there’s no indication of other projects that were delayed or unrealised – especially during the 1980s, when Altman’s reputation in Hollywood meant that he was pretty well forced to make small-scale, inexpensive movies.   The involvement of his family in the development of Ron Mann’s film hasn’t, however, resulted in hagiography.  One of Altman’s sons, Stephen, is candid about his father’s film projects taking precedence over his children until Robert Altman’s later years.

Kathryn Reed Altman’s voice is heard several times and she appears briefly, near the end of the film, to describe the big effect that Brief Encounter had on Altman when he first saw it.  (Altman’s widow looks much younger in this clip than she did at last week’s BFI screening, which made me wonder how long Mann’s documentary had been in the works.)  Otherwise, the only talking heads, apart from Altman himself and others who appear in archive material, are a succession of actors who worked with him and Paul Thomas Anderson (who was, for insurance purposes, standby director on Altman’s last completed film, A Prairie Home Companion).  Each of them is asked to define the word ‘Altmanesque’.  This is a good device and it yields some responses that are worth hearing but the triple definition of the word supplied by Mann and, presumably, Len Blum, who is credited as the writer of Altman, is puzzling in that it appears at the very start, rather than at the end, of the film.   The third part of this definition is ‘indestructible’ and this is meant to contradict Altman’s description of making a movie as being like building a sandcastle.  Mann overworks this at the start of the film.  He shows a sandcastle emerging from a beach and then disappearing; this is before we hear Altman’s voice saying that a movie is a sandcastle – the obviously unintended effect is to make his words nearly tautologous.  Once I’d seen Mann’s film through, it struck me that he might have become anxious that it was somehow insufficient – that it needed the kind of elaboration he includes in the introduction.  The premature definition and the sandcastle are a wrong way of addressing this but Ron Mann was right to be concerned: Altman is entertaining and informative but you feel it should have been illuminating too.

16 October 2014